Essay exams have been administered to students at all grade levels to evaluate various skills such as writing, comprehension and/or communication. Essay exams have been used both in classroom environments and outside of the classroom. For instance, a company might utilize an essay exam in its hiring process to assess an applicant's ability to communicate effectively. Alternatively, a country, state or municipality might administer an essay exam to assess a foreign examinee's knowledge in a particular field prior to permitting him or her to practice in that jurisdiction. Other essay exams are administered to determine whether or not a student has attained a specified level of knowledge, or mastery, of a given subject in order for a college, university or other educational institution to grant course credit for that given subject. Additionally, essays have been used as part of standardized academic tests to evaluate a student's qualification for admittance into a college or university. Other standardized exams, such as an attorney's state bar exam or a medical doctor's board exam, generally include an essay portion in addition to a multiple choice portion and must be passed before a license to practice is granted by a state government.
Thus, standardized tests including essay-based questions are often administered to particular groups, such as students, prospective medical doctors, engineers, architects and/or attorneys. Because the scores assigned to such tests are-typically used by, for example, colleges, universities or state governments as a factor in determining whether an examinee will be admitted to study at a particular institution or to practice in a particular field, it is critical that these scores are accurate and correctly reflect the examinee's level of skill and knowledge in the subject tested.
Unlike multiple-choice exams, essay exams typically require human graders to grade the responses. Essay grading is laborious and, as a consequence, requires significantly more time to complete than machine-graded multiple-choice questions. Accordingly, computer-based automated essay scoring systems have been developed to reduce the effort required of human graders. Exemplary automated essay scoring systems are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,181,909 to Burstein et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 6,366,759 to Burstein et al., each of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Automated essay scoring systems typically require extensive data collection to build a model for grading essay responses. Such data collection limits the effectiveness of automated essay scoring systems since only essay responses from widely administered tests may be adequately graded using such systems.
It is therefore desirable to provide an automated essay scoring system that does not require extensive data collection.
It is further desirable to provide an automated essay scoring system that reduces the time required to grade essay responses.
The present disclosure is directed to solving one or more of the above listed problems.